Buch lesen: «The American Duchess»

Prologue
The Heart Has Its Reasons

Once upon a time there was a charming, handsome prince. Whenever he visited even the farthest reaches of his kingdom, his people flocked to see him. He was adored the world over. Everyone expected him to marry a pretty, well-bred English virgin who would one day become Queen of England and its vast empire. But, when the prince was thirty-seven years old – having previously shown no sign of wanting to get married – he fell in love with an odd-looking, twice-divorced American. No one thought that the affair would last, so everyone close to him kept quiet about it. When the prince’s father, the king, died five years later, the prince inherited the Crown. Courtiers assumed that the new king would find a suitable young bride. To their horror he said that he could not continue to be king without the American woman he loved by his side and that he intended to marry her. Everyone in the royal palaces, the prime minister, the government, the Church, were shocked. They accused the wicked witch-divorcee of being a sorceress who had cast a spell over their poor, gentle prince in order to become queen. The king’s ministers told him that if he married this terrible woman, he would have to surrender the Crown.

But instead of renouncing his love, the king sacrificed his whole realm – an empire of over five hundred million people – to be with her. He only ruled for 326 days, making his reign one of the shortest in his country’s history. His devoted subjects were heartbroken. They blamed the ugly witch for taking their beloved sovereign away from them. His family banished him from the land, leaving him free to marry the woman he loved. Denied royal status, the couple spent the rest of their lives in exile, roaming the world aimlessly, sad that they could not return to the king’s homeland and to the little castle that he adored. The world, meanwhile, imagined that this was the Greatest Love Story Ever Told and that husband and wife went on to live Happily Ever After.

***

The story of the abdication of King Edward VIII and his marriage to Wallis Simpson has been told so many times that it has taken on the character of a fairy tale. Like fairy tales, much of what we are repeatedly told is in fact make-believe. The most scandalous love affair of the twentieth century may have softened into a romantic legend with time, but dark myths still endure. The dashing young prince, whose charisma and glamour ensured him the status of a movie star, gave up ‘the greatest throne in history’, as Churchill called it, to marry his one true love, an American divorcee. Surely, there can be no greater act of sacrifice than to give up such power, privilege and adoration for love? And for a woman whose appeal was such a mystery to most.

Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David Windsor was considered the world’s most eligible bachelor. Society hostess Elsa Maxwell first met the Prince of Wales in the early 1920s ‘at Mrs Cuckoo Belleville’s house in Manchester Square. He was a gay, golden-haired, blue-eyed, debonair Prince Charming, the most famous celebrity in the world, who seemed a Raphael angel grown up. He projected an aura of glamour that was as unmistakeable as it was authentic.’ To the fashion editor Diana Vreeland ‘he was the Golden Prince. You must understand that to be a woman of my generation in London – any woman – was to be in love with the Prince of Wales.’

Men were equally beguiled. Even the senior Palace courtier, Alan Lascelles, known in royal circles as ‘Tommy’ and later a fierce critic of the former king, gushed in 1921 that the heir to the throne was ‘the most attractive man I ever met’. Piers ‘Joey’ Legh, an equerry who remained in the prince’s service for twenty years, accompanying him into exile, said of Edward a decade after the abdication: his ‘charm was so great that he would thrill with emotion if the duke entered the room just now’.

When news of Wallis Simpson’s affair with Edward broke from under a media blackout in 1936, what seemed unfathomable was why, when the Prince of Wales could have had any beauty he desired, he was smitten with an unconventional, severe-looking American, two years his junior with two living husbands. So much gossip and innuendo has been levelled at Wallis that it has become near impossible to discern the real woman or to hear her authentic voice amid the cacophony of condemnation. As her friend Herman Rogers said of her in 1936, ‘much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist’. Lady Monckton, a close friend of the Windsors, later concurred: ‘People were always being nasty about Wallis. You must remember how jealous people felt when the Prince of Wales fell in love with her.’

Ever since, we have been overfed a diet of fantastical slander: that Wallis was really a man; that she had a perverse psycho-sexual hold over the prince; that she used manipulation and feminine wiles to lure him into abdicating; that she was a ruthless, cold, ambitious bitch, who schemed from the outset to be Queen of England. The well-worn view is that she alone was responsible for almost bringing down the British monarchy, triggering a constitutional crisis caused by her determination to marry the heir apparent. We have experienced her so fully as Machiavellian through others’ projections and prejudice, through misogynistic memoirs, biographies and unflattering portrayals, that she has become a caricature of villainous womanhood. Devoid of warmth, emotional complexity and a beating heart, she remains the brittle victim of salacious chatter and brutal character assassination many decades after her pitiful death.

Instead of simply belittling Wallis and defaming her reputation, we might try to understand this modern, intelligent, remarkable woman and the impossible situation she was placed in. She was, in fact, very warm, funny, irresistibly charming, loyal and dignified to the end. Adored by her many friends, she was written off by a cunning, powerful British establishment who sought to destroy and diminish her; men like Tommy Lascelles – who famously dismissed Wallis as ‘shop-soiled’ with ‘a voice like a rusty saw’ – the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

However, far from being the villain of the abdication, Wallis was the victim. Instead of pushing for Edward to leave the throne, she had tried to prevent it. What most of her detractors fail to acknowledge is that she never wanted to marry Edward. Naturally she was initially flattered by his attention; as an American woman, living in London surrounded by society hostesses and social climbers, she felt giddy to be included in His Royal Highness’s elegant and rarefied circle. What woman would not have been beguiled by the prince’s ‘unmistakable aura of power and authority?’ According to Wallis: ‘His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialised; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; aeroplanes stood waiting.’ Wallis made no secret of her open-mouthed delight, but she also believed Edward’s interest in her was transitory. She never expected his infatuation to last. In 1935 she wrote to her beloved aunt, Bessie Merryman, in Wallis’s hometown of Baltimore: ‘What a bump I’ll get when a young beauty appears and plucks the Prince from me. Anyway, I am prepared.’

The real tragedy for Wallis is that she could never have been prepared for what was to come, for the speed with which events spun so quickly out of her control. Though worldly, she would find herself painfully out of her depth. Unable to juggle her settled, second marriage to Ernest Simpson with the overwhelming and incessant demands of a besotted prince – whom she and Ernest nicknamed ‘Peter Pan’ – Wallis became the perfect pawn. She did not bargain for Edward’s self-absorbed, possessive and stubborn love for her and his absolute refusal to give her up. Although she valiantly tried to break off the relationship prior to the abdication, it would become impossible for Wallis to ever leave his side.

Probably the biggest lie in this fable is that Wallis lured Edward from his destiny. Her detractors claim that if she had never divorced Ernest Simpson, the abdication would not have occurred. Yet the truth is that she had had no intention of divorcing Ernest. It was Edward, then king, who forced her into this untenable position. In the name of his needy love, Wallis paid the ultimate price: entrapment by a childish narcissist who threw the largest tantrum in history when he could not have the two things he wanted most in the world: Wallis and the throne.

When I began my research, keen to strip away decades of grotesque caricature in an attempt to find the real Wallis, I feared that doors might close. The opposite happened; people were keen to talk with me and I found that those close to the story did not hold Wallis in contempt. Many powerful, key players who had led the charge against Mrs Simpson were now dead. The late queen mother, then Elizabeth, Duchess of York, for one, was furious that Edward’s abdication might force her highly strung and physically weak husband, Bertie, onto the throne and dehumanised Wallis as ‘that woman’ and ‘the lowest of the low’. The spite meted out to Wallis by certain members of the royal family was staggering. Those of Wallis’s friends who are still alive seem to finally feel freer to speak about the injustice they witnessed. Sitting in elegant drawing rooms in London, Paris, Gstaad and Marbella, interviewing those who knew Wallis, I heard the same sentiments echoed; that she was witty and diverting company; that the duke was self-absorbed and less engaging. That Wallis, possessed of perfect manners, behaved with laudable inner strength and dignity, despite the terrible slurs and insults hurled at her. ‘The world adored him,’ Hugo Vickers said of the Duke of Windsor, ‘yet the people who knew him and worked for him, had reservations about him. The world hated her but the people who knew her and worked for her, absolutely adored her.’

None of those with whom I spoke recognised the wicked Wallis of the history books. Repeatedly, I heard of her kindliness, sense of fun and depth of friendship, which contradicted the public image of a hard-nosed, shallow woman. The closer I got to Wallis’s true character, the greater my incredulity and mounting fury that the world has judged her unfairly and unkindly. She certainly was no saint, but she was far from the sinister manipulator depicted in many accounts. Her friends noted in their diaries and memoirs their warmth and respect for Wallis, yet these tender recollections never seemed to gain sufficient attention. ‘She was so affectionate, a loving sort of friend – very rare you know,’ wrote Diana Vreeland. ‘Women are rarely that sort of friend to each other.’ Wallis was similarly loyal to male friends, too. The Conservative MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon said: ‘She has always shown me friendship, understanding and even affection, and I have known her to do a hundred kindnesses and never a mean act.’

Wallis was viciously derided at the time of Edward’s abdication and then kept at a distance, denied the opportunity to change public mistrust and misgivings about her. When the scandal broke in the press, she was, understandably, devastated. ‘The enormity of the hatred I had aroused and the distorted image of me that seemed to be forming in minds everywhere went far beyond anything I had anticipated even in my most depressed moments,’ she later wrote. ‘I became obsessed by the notion that, in a manner impossible for me to comprehend, a calculated and organized effort to discredit me had been set afoot.’

She was right. So sensational were the press reports and fevered gossip in 1936 – Mrs Simpson was ‘gold digger’, ‘a whore’, ‘a sorceress’, ‘a Nazi spy’ – that many of the British and European aristocracy, meeting her for the first time, were taken aback. The woman they encountered was nothing like her vulgar fictional persona. ‘I was absolutely flabbergasted when I first met the duchess,’ recalled Count Rudolf Graf von Schönburg. ‘She was the complete opposite of everything we had heard about her.’

Count Rudi became a close friend of the Windsors, after meeting them in the early sixties in Marbella, where he ran a fashionable club. ‘The story of the abdication was so shocking,’ he recalled, ‘but the duchess was so much more ladylike than anything we had been led to believe. It was all “this loud, twice-divorced, American” … yet here was this charming, dignified woman, always well-dressed but never overdoing it. Maybe sometimes she laughed too loudly but that was it. I liked her very much and we spent many days and evenings with the couple, so had the opportunity to be treated like close friends and almost family. I have always considered that her position in history is factually incorrect and very unfair.’

The Duke of Fragnito had similar preconceptions when he met the duchess in Palm Beach in the early 1960s. ‘I didn’t want to like her because of everything I had heard about her,’ he admitted. ‘But I was taken aback by her grace and impeccable manners. To my great surprise she behaved like a real royal. She was just as captivating as the duke. They both had this ability to produce an electric charm which I have never forgotten.’

Vogue editor Diana Vreeland noted of Wallis: ‘There was something about her that made you look twice.’ The duchess’s private secretary, Johanna Schutz, accompanied Wallis to New York by boat shortly after the duke died. The duchess did not put her name on the passenger list and usually ate in her room. Occasionally, she would enter the dining room to keep Miss Schutz company. ‘Some people recognised her, others didn’t, but they knew she was special,’ said Hugo Vickers. ‘She was somebody. She had a hypnotic effect.’

‘I can’t say that she was sexy but she was sassy,’ remembered Nicky Haslam. ‘She walked into the room and it took off. The only other person I knew who had that quality was Frank Sinatra.’ Haslam, an interior designer who met Wallis in New York in 1962, said: ‘Wallis had innate American style. But to be an American was against her then, almost more than the divorce.’ Wallis described the archaic snobbery she encountered when living in London: ‘The British seemed to cherish a sentiment of settled disapproval towards things American.’

I was sitting with Nicholas Haslam in a Chelsea restaurant, when he produced an envelope, saying that he had something special to show me. It was a handwritten letter from Wallis to her friend, Elsie de Wolfe. Elsie, who became Lady Mendl in 1926 on her marriage to Sir Charles Mendl, a press attaché to the British embassy in Paris, was an eccentric who practised yoga and underwent plastic surgeries, years before both became de rigueur. Credited with inventing the profession of interior decorating, she was famed for her elaborate parties, and in particular the Circus Ball at the Villa Trianon, in Versailles in 1939. Attended by over 700 guests, including the duke and duchess, the ball was held in a green and white dance pavilion, and featured a fabulously jewelled elephant. Circumstances would force Wallis to adopt Elsie’s favourite motto, embroidered on taffeta cushions strewn throughout the Villa Trianon: ‘Never Complain, Never Explain’.

Turning the letter over in my hand, I admired Wallis’s chic stationery, the thick envelope lined with forest green tissue paper and the simple address on crisp cream paper, ‘La Croë, Cap D’Antibes’, the duke and duchess’s villa in the south of France. The letter, written in 1948, and dated Friday 24 September, reveals Wallis’s loose, looping handwriting in black ink: open and hurried in style and pace, there are endearing crossings out and insertions as her thoughts race across the page with barely any punctuation. She asks Elsie if she and Edward can come to stay with her at the Villa Trianon on their way back to Paris, and shares details of her day-to-day life: ‘I swam this A.M and tonight I go to Cap d’ail to play Oklahoma [a card game] with Winston Churchill who is stopping with Max Beaverbrook – we are great rivals and play every other night …’

The letter is full of warmth and love. Wallis reveals herself to be a genuine, open friend. She tells Elsie how difficult it is packing up and leaving La Croë, which she and the duke had leased for the previous decade. Her loneliness and tension is tangible; she details her desire to be alone, relaxing with Elsie, whom she misses: ‘I long to see your elephant again and sit in the tent with the blackamoors, look at you and the things you have created,’ Wallis wrote. ‘I do wish I could come sooner to do all this. My great and deep affection, as always, Wallis.’

When I contemplated the duke and duchess’s empty, peripatetic life after abdication and exile, I felt a profound sadness. What was their purpose from that point on? To live a life together to prove that it had not all been for nought? To be happy? To appear to be happy? There must have been an element of continuous silent strain for them both, a seam of guilt they dared not plunder. ‘I have a theory that when men let women down, they feel awful,’ Hugo Vickers told me. ‘The duke turned Wallis into the most hated woman in the world, then he couldn’t get her what he promised her: the HRH title, or his family to accept her. So he must have spent his whole life feeling guilty. I saw him once at Princess Marina’s* funeral and I have never seen a man with sadder eyes.’

Over three decades into their post-abdication existence, just a few years before the duke’s death, the Windsors were interviewed on live television, on the BBC, by the broadcaster, Kenneth Harris. The programme was watched by 12 million viewers. Wallis comes across effortlessly, she is witty and warm. The duke, with his hangdog eyes, appears less comfortable in his own skin, constantly looking down at his hands, studying his nails, fidgeting. The interviewer asks the couple if they have any regrets. The duchess, elegant in cream silk with a pale blue scarf, laughs nervously: ‘About certain things. I wish it could have been different. Naturally, we’ve had some hard times. Who hasn’t? But we’ve been very happy.’ The duke awkwardly grabs her hand in confirmation.

The main aim of this book is to look beneath this convenient illusion and give Wallis a voice: to peel back the layers of prejudice and examine the wider motives for the enduring propaganda against her. For Edward the relationship started as a thrilling coup de foudre; for Wallis, it would soon feel like a Faustian pact. Did a genuine love emerge between them as they surmounted the abdication together; or was the monumental sacrifice on both their parts a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions? Wallis, quietly stoical, rarely sought pity or openly complained about her suffering. She was always incredibly dignified, generously concluding in her memoirs: ‘Any woman who has been loved as I have been loved, and who, too, has loved, has experienced life in its fullness.’

* Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent (1906–68), was born Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. She was married to Prince George, Duke of Kent, Edward’s favourite brother.